The oldest Salem family-owned business has closed its doors. Larimer Abstract has been an institution in Salem since 1879. The closure comes as the fourth-generation owner Mark Larimer is retiring with no other members of his family wanting to take over.
Larimer had not originally planned to stay in the business himself but disliked his original profession as a teacher and decided to join his father full-time instead in 1977.
“My great-grandfather was 14 when he started and took over the business several years later. My grandfather and father, then me.”
Larimer says his great-grandfather John Larimer first went to work for Jacob Chance in 1866 before taking ownership in 1879.
Larimer said until the mid-1980s when computers began to enter the scene, all of the property transfer records were on paper.
“We had what was called a title plan which includes a track index and a name index so you could search by the legal description or by the names of the party. It was all on paper records.”
Larimer says some of the records have never been transferred to a computer and they still search with the number system.
The business was located in two other downtown buildings before moving to its current location in 1935.
Larimer says he will miss solving the puzzles of some of the abstract searches.
“Well you try to think did somebody die, did someone get divorced? What happened to cause this gap? You look at other records to try and piece it together. Did someone’s name change maybe, there could be a lot of things that could cause a little confusion in the chain of time.”
Larimer says there have been several peak times over the years. The busiest was probably the oil boom in the late 30’s and 1940s where they had two shifts of typists to try and keep up with the demand of the oil companies for the purchase of mineral rights. More recently, the arrival of World Color Press in the 1970s resulted in a large amount of residential construction.
Another big change has come in the past 20 years when in addition to abstracting titles, abstractors began selling title insurance.
In retirement, Larimer says he’ll have more time to travel and visit with grandchildren. He still plans to remain active on the Salem Historical Commission and the Salem Community High School Sports Hall of Fame. But Larimer says he isn’t done yet with the business as he probably has a good year of work ahead getting all the paperwork in the office in order. He is hopeful of selling the old property records so they can still be accessed.
Photo showing Mark’s father Dwight ‘Bill’ Larimer and his grandfather John W. Larimer. Notice the two phones. When phones first became available, there were two phone companies in Salem and you had to have separate phones for each company.
